2003 Again: Time for Another Final Cut Pro Revolution?

27 January 20141,520 viewsNo Comment

Back in 2003, Walter Murch was an Academy Award nominee for the editing work he did on Cold Mountain (iTunes) and he did that work on a Mac using the then “new” Final Cut Pro. While that wasn’t the first big film edited on FCP, it was the movie that shook up the editing business for good — Apple and the Mac were back in a big way!

The fundamental drivers in 2003 were that Macs were (comparatively) cheap and came with integrated FireWire, were generally more reliable (than PCs) and Final Cut Pro at $999 was both cheap and powerful — you could deliver pro product for tens of thousands less than pretty much any competitive solution. A revolution.

The revolution stumbled a bit in 2011 with Apple’s release of Final Cut Pro X, which added some great features while stripping away core functionality that many editors had come to rely on. Those features are 98 percent back and more.

A big part of the “more” is the recent release of the Mac Pro and Thunderbolt 2 — an off-the-shelf 4K editing solution. Film editors get one seamless solution, door-to-door, made by Apple and it’s cheap.

Final Cut Pro: The Set Up

That is the promise and there is perhaps no one more behind the concept than Neil Smith from LumaForge. Granted, as a Mac + Final Cut Pro + hardware integrator, he’s hardly unbiased.